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j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 1 c g w 5 3 thing, they became bipeds. "Those were the rules in the first film, and we perfected them a bit more on the second one. They worked in helping us find the balance we were looking for," says Pickard. "Within the first few minutes of watching the first film, you accepted these rules and just went along for the ride. You never see the characters running on two legs. We found that gets too cartoony and blows you out of the world a little bit." There were other rules as well: The rabbits did not fold their arms or point with individu- al "fingers." Rather, they had to perform tasks with their whole paw. "Will Gluck felt things like that would tip it over the line of being too human," Reichelt explains. Although the animators experimented with using two different rigs for the rabbits, it became very difficult to blend them together since the animals were shiing between bi- pedal and quadrupedal positioning so oen. Furthermore, the deadline for Peter 2 was tighter and the complexity was much higher than the first film, so the rigs had to be very, very fast – real time, in fact. And the best way to proceed, Pickard says, was to have a single rig that was optimized for both positionings. "We spent a good deal of time making sure the characters would work primarily in biped mode because that's where we spend most of our time with the characters. But they also had to work as quadrupeds. And the way to do that was making sure all the bones were in the correct places based off the skeletons," Pickard explains. "We then had to offset all of those major components in the rig so we could lay the quadruped motion on top of the biped rig." Human Interaction The same cast of original characters returns in Peter 2: Peter, cousin Benjamin, and Peter's three sisters: Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-Tail. This in addition to 10 or so supporting CG animal characters, plus four newcomers, in all adding up to 19 base characters, not including digital doubles, background animal extras, and unique characters in one-off scenes, such as Little Pig Robinson or Squirrel Nutkin. There is also the cast of human actors with whom the CG animals interact – not an easy thing to accomplish, especially when so many shots were a hybrid mix of the two types. To aid with the film shoot, stand-ins were used for the digital characters in the form of foam-board representations of the bunnies on sticks. Also, "stuffies" — stuffed fabric weighted and designed to match the body of a real rabbit — were employed. These props proved essential, especially in scenes where there was a need for the actors to interact with the digital bunnies. "We had the same situations on this movie that we had on the first, and more, because this movie is much larger in scope. For example, in the first five minutes of this movie, we have every kind of big challenge that we faced on the first, but all wrapped up into this one sequence," Reichelt points out. "And it only gets more complex from there with the interactions. The real key to pulling it off was getting a good performance from the actor in-camera during the take." Thus, his and the animation team's presence on set became invaluable to achieving this. The visual effects work here was also very involved — a digital version of the actor needed to be built and rigged so that the rotomation team could do an accurate 3D track of the movements. Animators then had to create a performance with the digital characters that balanced with the in-camera performance from the actors, who were holding a static prop. Character effects dealt with the interaction of the fur and cloth with the actor, before com- positing brought everything together. Additionally, there is a great deal of interaction between the CG characters and props. When a digital character interacts with a practical prop, that item needed to become CG as well. There were also occasional instances when a prop needed to be both practical and CG in the same shot, wherein the prop needed to transfer between the actors and the CG characters. Hopped-Up While Animal Logic solved many of the initial challenges that popped up while creating the first Peter Rabbit, on Peter 2, it became more about optimization. "All the things we were trying to achieve were similar but amplified because of the increased level of complexity and the increased number of instances of them in the film," says Reichelt. "We generally used the same approaches, but we were refining the processes and trying to be more efficient in order to tackle the increased amount of work." So, I guess you could say that with this film, Animal Logic made new tracks while hopping down this familiar but more compli- cated bunny trail. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of CGW. Artists built a number of set extensions and added CG characters.